Today, we’re leveraging the power of SpamBrain to neutralize the impact of unnatural links on search results.
Fighting link spam with SpamBrain
SpamBrain is our AI-based spam-prevention system. Besides using it to detect spam directly, it can now detect both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links.
What this update means for your site
Our launch today, which we refer to as the December 2022 link spam update, will take about two weeks to fully roll out. Ranking may change as spammy links are neutralized and any credit passed by these unnatural links are lost. This launch will affect all languages.
As we have always emphasized, links obtained primarily for artificial manipulation of Search rankings are link spam. Our algorithms and manual actions aim to nullify these unnatural links at scale, and we will continue to improve our coverage. If you come across sites that engage in inorganic link building, please report them to us. If you have specific feedback in regards to this update, feel free to post in our help community.
While Google’s automated systems to detect search spam are constantly operating, we occasionally make notable improvements to how they work. When we do, we refer to this as a spam update and share when they happen on our list of Google Search ranking updates.
For example, SpamBrain is our AI-based spam-prevention system. From time-to-time, we improve that system to make it better at spotting spam and to help ensure it catches new types of spam.
Sites that see a change after a spam update should review our spam policies to ensure they are complying with those. Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all. Making changes may help a site improve if our automated systems learn over a period of months that the site complies with our spam policies.
In the case of a link spam update (an update that specifically deals with link spam), making changes might not generate an improvement. This is because when our systems nullify spammy links, the link credit that was previously generated is lost. If this credit was helping to generate rankings, it cannot be regained.
Reference: https://developers.google.com/search/updates/spam-updates
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